Chapter 42
I looked around the grey-walled chamber of Unas, up and down the long registers of hieroglyphs in which the Pyramid Texts were inscribed. They were written in a dead language. Nevertheless, the constant affirmation, repeated over and over again in these ancient compositions, was that of life – eternal life – which was to be achieved through the pharaoh’s rebirth as a star in the constellation of Orion. As the reader will recall from Chapter Nineteen, (where we compared Egyptian beliefs with those of Ancient Mexico), there were several utterances which voiced this aspiration explicitly:
Oh King, you are this Great Star, the Companion of Orion, who traverses the sky with Orion … you ascend from the east of the sky being renewed in your due season, and rejuvenated in your due time …’1
Though undeniably beautiful there was nothing inherently extraordinary about these sentiments, and it was by no means impossible to attribute them to a people assessed by the French archaeologist Gaston Maspero as having ‘always remained half savage’.2Furthermore, since Maspero had been the first Egyptologist to enter the pyramid of Unas,3 and was considered a great authority on the Texts, it was hardly surprising that his opinions should have shaped all academic responses to this literature since he began to publish translations from it in the 1880s.4 Maspero (with a little help from a jackal) had brought the Pyramid Texts to the world. Thereafter, the dominance of his particular prejudices about the past had functioned as a filter on knowledge, inhibiting variant interpretations of the more opaque or puzzling utterances. This seemed to me to be unfortunate to say the least. What it meant was that, despite the technical and scientific puzzles raised by monuments like the Great Pyramid at Giza, scholars had ignored the implications of some striking passages in the Texts.
These passages sounded suspiciously like attempts to express complex technical and scientific imagery in an entirely inappropriate idiom. Maybe it was coincidence, but the result resembled the outcome that we might expect today if we were to try to translate Einstein’s Theory of Relativity into Chaucerian English or to describe a supersonic aircraft in vocabulary derived from Middle High German.
Broken images of a lost technology?
Take for example some of the peculiar equipment and accessories designated for the pharaoh’s use as he journeyed to his eternal resting place among the stars:
The gods who are in the sky are brought to you, the gods who are on earth assemble for you, they place their hands under you, they make a ladder for you that you may ascend on it into the sky, the doors of the sky are thrown open to you, the doors of the starry firmament are thrown open for you.5
The ascending pharaoh was identified with, and frequently referred to, as ‘an Osiris’. Osiris himself, as we have seen, was frequently linked to and associated with the constellation of Orion. Osiris-Orion was said to have been the first to have climbed the great ladder the gods had made. And several utterances left no doubt that this ladder had not extended upwards from earth to heaven but downwards from heaven to earth. It was described as a rope-ladder6 and the belief was that it had hung from an ‘iron plate’ suspended in the sky.7
Were we dealing here, I wondered, simply with the bizarre imaginings of half-savage priests? Or might there be some other explanation for allusions such as these?
In Utterance 261, ‘The King is a flame, moving before the wind to the end of the sky and to the end of the earth … the King travels the air and traverses the earth … there is brought to him a way of ascent to the sky …’8
Switching to dialogue, Utterance 310 proclaimed,
‘O you whose vision is in his face and whose vision is in the back of his head, bring this to me!’
‘What ferry-boat shall be brought to you?’
‘Bring me: “It-flies-and-alights”.’9
Utterance 332, supposedly spoken by the King himself, confided, ’I am this one who has escaped from the coiled serpent, I have ascended in a blast of fire having turned myself about. The two skies go to me.10
And in Utterance 669 it was asked, ‘Wherewith can the King be made to fly-up?’
The reply was given: ‘There shall be brought to you the Hnw-bark [italicized word unstranslatable] and the … [text missing] of the hn-bird [italicized word untranslatable]. You shall fly up therewith … You shall fly up and alight.’11
Other passages also seemed to me worthy of more thorough investigation than they have received from scholars. Here are a few examples:
O my father, great King, the aperture of the sky-window is opened for you.12
’The door of the sky at the horizon opens to you, the gods are glad at meeting you … May you sit on this iron throne of yours, as the Great One who is in Heliopolis.13
O King, may you ascend … The sky reels at you, the earth quakes at you, the Imperishable Stars are afraid of you. I have come to you, O you whose seats are hidden, that I may embrace you in the sky …14
The earth speaks, the gate of the earth god is open, the doors of Geb are opened for you … May you remove yourself to the sky upon your iron throne.15
O my father the King, such is your going when you have gone as a god, your travelling as a celestial being … you stand in the Conclaves of the horizon … and sit on this throne of iron at which the gods marvel …16
The constant references to iron, though easy to overlook, were puzzling. Iron, I knew, had been a rare metal in Ancient Egypt, particularly in the Pyramid Age when it had supposedly only been available in meteoritic form.17 Yet here, in the Pyramid Texts, there seemed to be an embarrassment of iron riches: iron plates in the sky, iron thrones, and elsewhere an iron sceptre (Utterance 665C) and even iron bones for the King (Utterances 325, 684 and 723).18
In the Ancient Egyptian language the name for iron had been bja, a word that meant literally ‘metal of heaven’ or ‘divine metal’.19 The knowledge of iron was thus regarded as yet another gift from the gods …
Repositories of a lost science?
What other fingerprints might these gods have left behind in the Pyramid Texts?20
In my readings – here and there among the most archaic of the Utterances – I had come across several metaphors that seemed to refer to the passage of epochs of precessional time. These metaphors stood out from the surrounding material because they were expressed in what had become a clear and familiar terminology to me: that of the archaic scientific language identified by Santillana and von Dechend in Hamlet’s Mill.21
The reader may recall that a cosmic ‘diagram’ of the four props of the sky was one of the standard thought tools employed in that ancient language. Its purpose was to assist visualisation of the four imaginary bands conceived as framing, supporting and defining a precessional world age. These were what astronomers call the ‘equinoctial and solstitial colures’ and were seen as hooping down from the celestial north pole and marking the four constellations against the background of which, for periods of 2160 years at a time, the sun would consistently rise on the spring and autumn equinoxes and on the winter and summer solstices.22
The Pyramid Texts appear to contain several versions of this diagram. Moreover, as is so often the case with prehistoric myths which transmit hard astronomical data, the precessional symbolism is interwoven tightly with violent images of terrestrial destruction – as though to suggest that the ‘breaking of the mill of heaven’, that is the transition every 2160 years from one zodiacal age to another, could under ill-omened circumstances bring catastrophic influences to bear on terrestrial events.
Thus it was said that
Ra–Atum, the god who created himself, was originally king over gods and men together but mankind schemed against his sovereignty, for he began to grow old, his bones became silver, his flesh gold and his hair [as] lapis lazuli.23
When he realized what was happening, the ageing Sun God (so reminiscent of Tonatiuh, the bloodthirsty Fifth Sun of the Aztecs) determined that he would punish this insurrection by killing off most of the human race. The instrument of the havoc he unleashed wassymbolized at times as a raging lioness wading in blood and at times as the fearsome lion-headed goddess Sekhmet who ’poured fire out of herself and savaged mankind in an ecstasy of slaughter.24
The terrible destruction continued unabated for a long period. Then at last Ra intervened to save the lives of a ‘remnant’, the ancestors of present humanity. This intervention took the form of a flood which the lioness thirstily lapped up and then fell asleep. When she awoke, she was no longer interested in pursuing the destruction, and peace descended upon the devastated world.25
Meanwhile Ra had resolved to ‘draw away’ from what was left of his creation: ‘As I live my heart is weary of staying with Mankind. I have gone on killing them [almost] to the very last one, so the [insignificant] remnant is not my affair …’26
The Sun God then rose into the sky on the back of the sky-goddess Nut who (for the purposes of the precessional metaphor about to be delivered) had transformed herself into a cow. Before very long – in a close analogy to the ‘shaft-tree’ that ‘shivered’ on Amlodhi’s wildly gyrating mill – the cow grew ‘dizzy and began to shake and to tremble because she was so high above the earth.’27 When she complained to Ra about this precarious state of affairs he commanded, ‘Let my son Shu be put beneath Nut to keep guard for me over the heavenly supports – which exist in the twilight. Put her above your head and keep her there.’28 As soon as Shu had taken his place beneath the cow and had stabilized her body, ‘the heavens above and the earth beneath came into being’. At the same moment, ‘the four legs of the cow’, as Egyptologist Wallis Budge commented in his classic study The Gods of the Egyptians, ‘became the four props of heaven at the four cardinal points’.29
Like most scholars, Budge understandably assumed that the ‘cardinal points’ referred to in this Ancient Egyptian tradition had strictly terrestrial connotations and that ‘heaven’ represented nothing more than the sky above our heads. He took it for granted that the point of the metaphor was for us to envisage the cow’s four legs as positioned at the four points of the compass – north, south, east and west. He also thought – and even today few Egyptologists would disagree with him – that the simple-minded priests of Heliopolis had actually believed that the sky had four corners which were supported on four legs and that Shu, ‘the skybearer par excellence’, had stood immobile like a pillar at the centre of the whole edifice.30
Reinterpreted in the light of Santillana’s and von Dechend’s findings, however, Shu and the four legs of the celestial cow look much more like the components of an archaic scientific symbol depicting the frame of a precessional world age – the polar axis (Shu) and the colures (the four legs or ‘props’ marking the equinoctial and solstitial cardinal points in the annual round of the sun).
Moreover, it is tempting to speculate which world age was being signalled here …
With a cow involved it could have been the Age of Taurus, although the Egyptians knew the difference between bulls and cows as well as anyone. But a much more likely contender – at any rate on purely symbolic grounds – is the age of Leo, from approximately 10,970 to 8810 BC.31 The reason is that Sekhmet, the agent of the destruction of Mankind referred to in the myth, was leonine in form. What better way to symbolize the troubled birth of the new world age of Leo than to depict its harbinger as a rampaging lion, particularly since the Age of Leo coincided with the final ferocious meltdown of the last Ice Age, during which huge numbers of animal species all over the earth were suddenly and violently rendered extinct.’32 Mankind survived the immense floods and earthquakes and rapid changes of climate that took place, but very probably in much reduced numbers and much reduced circumstances.
The train of the Sun and the dweller in Sirius
Of course the ability to recognize and define precessional world ages in myth implies that the Ancient Egyptians posessed better observational astronomy and a more sophisticated understanding of the mechanics of the solar system than any ancient people have hitherto been credited with.33 There is no doubt that knowledge of this calibre, if it existed at all, would have been highly regarded by the Ancient Egyptians, who would have transmitted it from generation to generation in a secretive manner. Indeed, it would have ranked among the highest arcana entrusted to the keeping of the priestly elite at Heliopolis and would have been passed on, in the main, through an oral and initiatory tradition.34 If, by chance it had found its way into the Pyramid Texts, is it not likely that its form would have been veiled by metaphors and allegories?
I walked slowly across the dusty floor of the tomb chamber of Unas, noting the heavy stillness in the air, casting my eyes over the faded blue and gold inscriptions. Expressed in coded language several millennia before Copernicus and Galileo, some of the passages inscribed on these walls seemed to offer clues to the true heliocentric nature of the solar system.
In one, for example, Ra, the Sun God, was depicted as seated upon an iron throne encircled by lesser gods who moved around him constantly and who were said to be ‘in his train’.35 Likewise, in another passage, the deceased Pharaoh was urged to ‘stand at the head of the two halves of the sky and weigh the words of the gods, the aged ones, who revolve around Ra.’36
If the ‘aged ones’ and the ‘encircling gods’ revolving around Ra should prove to be parts of a terminology referring to the planets of our solar system, the original authors of the Pyramid Texts must have enjoyed access to some remarkably advanced astronomical data. They must have known that the earth and the planets revolved around the sun rather than vice versa.37 The problem this raises is that neither the Ancient Egyptians at any stage in their history, nor even their successors the Greeks, or for that matter the Europeans until the Renaissance, are supposed to have possessed cosmological data of anything approaching this quality. How, therefore, can its presence be explained in compositions which date back to the dawn of Egyptian civilization?
Another (and perhaps related) mystery concerns the star Sirius, which the Egyptians identified with Isis, the sister and consort of Osiris and the mother of Horus. In a passage addressed to Osiris himself, the Pyramid Texts state:
Thy sister Isis cometh unto thee rejoicing in her love for thee. Thou settest her upon thee, thy issue entereth into her, and she becometh great with child like the star Sept [Sirius, the Dog Star]. Horus–Sept cometh forth from thee in the form of Horus, dweller in Sept.38
Many interpretations of this passage are, of course, possible. What intrigued me, however, was the clear implication that Sirius was to be regarded as a dual entity in some way comparable to a woman ‘great with child’. Moreover, after the birth (or coming forth) of that child, the text makes a special point of reminding us that Horus remained a ‘dweller in Sept’, presumably suggesting that he stayed close to his mother.
Sirius is an unusual star. A sparkling point of light particularly prominent in the winter months in the night skies of the northern hemisphere, it consists of a binary star system, i. e. it is in fact, as the Pyramid Texts suggest, a ‘dual entity’. The major component, Sirius-A, is what we see. Sirius-B, on the other hand – the dwarf-star which revolves around Sirius A – is absolutely invisible to the naked eye. Its existence did not become known to Western science until 1862, when US astronomer Alvin Clark spotted it through one of the largest and most advanced telescopes of the day.39 How could the scribes who wrote the Pyramid Texts possibly have obtained the information that Sirius was two stars in one?
In The Sirius Mystery, an important book published in 1976, I knew that the American author Robert Temple had offered some extraordinary answers to this question.40 His study focused on the traditional beliefs of the Dogon tribe of West Africa – beliefs in which the binary character of Sirius was explicitly described and in which the correct figure of fifty years was given for the period of the orbit of Sirius-B around Sirius-A.41 Temple argued cogently that this high quality technical information had been passed down to the Dogon from the Ancient Egyptians through a process of cultural diffusion, and that it was to the Ancient Egyptians that we should look for an answer to the Sirius mystery. He also concluded that the Ancient Egyptians must have received the information from intelligent beings from the region of Sirius’.42
Like Temple, I had begun to suspect that the more advanced and sophisticated elements of Egyptian science made sense only if they were understood as parts of an inheritance. Unlike Temple, I saw no urgent reason to attribute that inheritance to extra-terrestrials. To my mind the anomalous star knowledge the Heliopolitan priests had apparently possessed was more plausibly explained as the legacy of a lost human civilization which, against the current of history, had achieved a high level of technological advancement in remote antiquity. It seemed to me that the building of an instrument capable of detecting Sirius-B might not have been beyond the ingenuity of the unknown explorers and scientists who originated the remarkable maps of the prehistoric world discussed in Part I. Nor would it have daunted the unknown astronomers and measurers of time who bequeathed to the Ancient Maya a calendar of amazing complexity, a data-base about the movements of the heavenly bodies which could only have been the product of thousands of years of accurately recorded observations, and a facility with very large numbers that seemed more appropriate to the needs of a complex technological society than to those of a ‘primitive’ Central American kingdom.43
Millions of years and the movements of the stars
Very large numbers also appeared in the Pyramid Texts, in the symbolic ‘boat of millions of years’, for example, in which the Sun God was said to navigate the dark and airless wastes of interstellar space.44 Thoth, the god of wisdom (‘he who reckons in heaven, the counter of the stars, the measurer of the earth’) was specifically empowered to grant a life of millions of years to the deceased pharaoh.45 Osiris, ‘king of eternity, lord of everlasting’, was described as traversing millions of years in his life.’46 And figures like ‘tens of millions of years’ (as well as the more mind-boggling ‘one million of millions of years’)47 occurred often enough to suggest that some elements at least of Ancient Egyptian culture must have evolved for the convenience of scientifically minded people with more than passing insight into the immensity of time.
Such a people would, of course, have required an excellent calendar – one that would have facilitated complex and accurate calculations. It was therefore not surprising to learn that the Ancient Egyptians, like the Maya, had possessed such a calendar and that their understanding of its workings seemed to have declined, rather than improved, as the ages went by.48 It was tempting to see this as the gradual erosion of a corpus of knowledge inherited an extremely long time ago, an impression supported by the Ancient Egyptians themselves, who made no secret of their belief that their calendar was a legacy which they had received ‘from the gods’.
We consider the possible identity of these gods in more detail in the following chapters. Whoever they were, they must have spent a great deal of their time observing the stars, and they had accumulated a fund of advanced and specialized knowledge concerning the star Sirius in particular. Further evidence for this came in the form of the most useful calendrical gift which the gods supposedly gave to the Egyptians: the Sothic (or Sirian) cycle.49
The Sothic cycle was based on what is referred to in technical jargon as ‘the periodic return of the heliacal rising of Sirius’, which is the first appearance of this star after a seasonal absence, rising at dawn just ahead of the sun in the eastern portion of the sky.50 In the case of Sirius the interval between one such rising and the next amounts to exactly 365.25 days – a mathematically harmonious figure, uncomplicated by further decimal points, which is just twelve minutes longer than the duration of the solar year.51
The curious thing about Sirius is that out of an estimated 2000 stars in the heavens visible to the naked eye it is the only one to rise heliacally at this precise and nicely rounded interval of 365 and a quarter days – a unique product of its ‘proper motion’ (the speed of its own movement through space) combined with the effects of precession of the equinoxes.52 Moreover, it is known that the day of the heliacal rising of Sirius – New Year’s Day in the Ancient Egyptian calendar – was traditionally calculated at Heliopolis, where the Pyramid Texts were compiled, and announced ahead of time to all the other major temples up and down the Nile.53
I remembered that Sirius was referred to directly in the Pyramid Texts by ‘her name of the New Year’.54 Together with other relevant utterances (e.g., 66955), this confirmed that the Sothic calendar was at least as old as the Texts themselves,56 and their origins stretched back into the mists of distant antiquity. The great enigma, therefore, is this: in such an early period, who could have possessed the necessary knowhow to observe and take note of the coincidence of the period of 365.25 days with the heliacal rising of Sirius – a coincidence described by the French mathematician R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz as ‘an entirely exceptional celestial phenomenon’?57
We cannot but admire the greatness of a science capable of discovering such a coincidence. The double star of Sirius was chosen because it was the only star that moves the needed distance and in the right direction against the background of the other stars. This fact, known four thousand years before our time and forgotten until our day, obviously demands an extraordinary and prolonged observation of the sky.58
It was such a legacy – built out of long centuries of precise observational astronomy and scientific record-keeping – that Egypt seems to have benefited from at the beginning of the historical period and that was expressed in the Pyramid Texts.
In this, too, there lies a mystery …
Copies, or translations?
Writing in 1934, the year of his death, Wallis Budge, former Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum and the author of an authoritative hieroglyphic dictionary,59 made this frank admission:
The Pyramid Texts are full of difficulties of every kind. The exact meanings of a large number of words found in them are unknown … The construction of the sentence often baffles all attempts to translate it, and when it contains wholly unknown words it becomes an unsolved riddle. It is only reasonable to suppose that these texts were often used for funerary purposes, but it is quite clear that their period of use in Egypt was little more than one hundred years. Why they were suddenly brought into use at the end of the Fifth Dynasty and ceased to be used at the end of the Sixth Dynasty is inexplicable.’60
Could the answer be that they were copies of an earlier literature which Unas, the last pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty, together with several of his successors in the Sixth Dynasty, had attempted to fix for ever in stone in the tomb chambers of their own pyramids? Budge thought so, and felt the evidence suggested that some at least of the source documents must have been exceedingly old:
Several passages bear evidence that the scribes who drafted the copies from which the cutters of the inscriptions worked did not understand what they were writing … The general impression is that the priests who drafted the copies made extracts from several compositions of different ages and having different contents …’61
All this assumed that the source documents, whatever they were, must have been written in an archaic form of the Ancient Egyptian language. There was, however, an alternative possibility which Budge failed to consider. Suppose that the task of the priests had been not only to copy material but to translate into hieroglyphs texts originally composed in another language altogether? If that language had included a technical terminology and references to artefacts and ideas for which no equivalent terms existed in Ancient Egyptian, this would provide an explanation for the strange impression given by certain of the utterances. Moreover, if the copying and translating of the original source documents had been completed by the end of the Sixth Dynasty, it was easy to understand why no more ‘Pyramid Texts’ had ever been carved: the project would have come to a halt when it had fulfilled its objective – which would have been to create a permanent hieroglyphic record of a sacred literature that had already been tottering with age when Unas had taken the throne of Egypt in 2356 BC.
Last records of the First Time?
Because we wanted to cover as much of the distance to Abydos as was possible before nightfall, Santha and I reluctantly decided that it was time to get back on the road. Although we had originally intended to spend only a few minutes, the sombre gloom and ancient voices of the Unas tomb chamber had lulled our senses and almost two hours had passed since our arrival. Stooping, we left the tomb and climbed the steeply angled passageway to the exit, where we paused to allow our eyes to adjust to the harsh mid-morning sunlight. As we did so, I took the opportunity to look over the pyramid itself, which had fallen into such a crumbling and thoroughly dilapidated state that its original form was barely recognizable. The core masonry, reduced to little more than a nondescript heap of rubble, was evidently of poor quality, and even the facing blocks – some of which were still intact – lacked the finesse and careful workmanship demonstrated by the older pyramids at Giza.
This was hard to explain in conventional historical terms. If the normal evolutionary processes that govern the development of architectural skills and ideas had been at work in Egypt, one would have expected to find the opposite to be true: the design, engineering and masonry of the Unas Pyramid should have been superior to these of the Giza group, which, according to orthodox chronology, had been built about two centuries previously.62
The uncomfortable fact that this was not the case (i. e., Giza was ‘better’ than Unas and not vice versa) created knotty challenges for Egyptologists and raised questions to which no satisfactory answers had been supplied. To reiterate the central problem: everything about the three stunning and superb pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure proclaimed that they were the end products of hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years of accumulated architectural and engineering experience. This was not supported by the archaeological evidence which left no doubt that they were among the earliest pyramids ever built in Egypt – in other words, they were not the products of the mature phase of that country’s pyramid-building experiment but, anomalously, were the creations of its infancy.
A further mystery also cried out for a solution. In the three great pyramids at Giza, Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty had reared up mansions of eternity – unprecedented and unsurpassed masterpieces of stone, hundreds of feet high, weighing millions of tons apiece, which incorporated many extremely advanced features. No pyramids of comparable quality were ever built again. But only a little later, beneath the smaller, shabbier superstructures of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasty pyramids, a sort of Hall of Records seemed to have been deliberately created: a permanent exhibition of copies or translations of archaic documents which was, at the same time, an unprecedented and unsurpassed masterpiece of scribal and hieroglyphic art.
In short, like the pyramids at Giza, it seemed that the Pyramid Texts had burst upon the scene with no apparent antecedents, and had occupied centre-stage for approximately a hundred years before ‘ceasing operations’, never to be bettered.
Presumably the ancient kings and sages who had arranged these things had known what they were doing? If so, their minds must have contained a plan, and they must have intended a strong connection to be seen between the completely uninscribed (but technically brilliant) – pyramids at Giza, and the brilliantly inscribed (but technically slipshod) pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties.
I suspected, too, that at least part of the answer to the problem might lie in the pyramid-field of Dahshur, which we passed fifteen minutes after leaving Saqqara. It was here that the so-called ‘Bent’ and ‘Red’ Pyramids were located. Attributed to Sneferu, Khufu’s father, these two monuments (by all accounts very well preserved) had been closed to the public many years ago. A military base had been built around them and they had for a long while been impossible to visit – under any circumstances, ever …
As we continued our journey south, through the bright colours of that December day, I was overtaken by a compelling sense that the Nile Valley had been the scene of momentous events for humanity long before the recorded history of mankind began. All the most ancient records and traditions of Egypt spoke of such events and associated them with the epoch during which the gods had ruled on earth: the fabled First Time, which was called Zep Tepi.63 We shall delve into these records in the next two chapters.